Product availability impacts many industries such as transportation, events, and retail, yet little empirical evidence documents the importance of stocking decisions for firm profits, vertical relationships, or consumers. We conduct several experiments, exogenously removing top-selling products...

We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2021 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in shortages in nearly all sectors early in the pandemic. Over time, the composition of...

Entrepôts are hubs that facilitate trade between multiple origins and destinations. We study these entrepôts, the network they form, and their impact on international trade. We document that the trade network is a hub-and-spoke system, where 80% of trade is shipped indirectly--nearly all via...

We present and test an explanation for lags in the adjustment of wholesale gasoline prices to changes in crude oil prices. Our simple model with costly adjustment of production and inventories implies that output prices will respond with a lag to cost shocks even in the absence of menu costs,...

The increasing importance of intermittent renewable energy sources suggests a growing importance for energy storage as a way of smoothing the variable output. In this paper I investigate factors affecting the amount of energy storage needed, including the degree of intermittency and the...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories move less than shipments over the business cycle. We argue that this requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. We construct, for six manufacturing industries, alternative measures of marginal cost that attribute...

If stock-outs are ignored and if demand shocks are additive, then optimal behavior requires that the marginal cost of production (MC) be equated with the expected marginal revenue of increasing expected sales by one unit (EMR). However,with more general demand shocks (and still ignoring...

The message of this paper can be summed up in two words: inventories matter. They matter empirically, in the sense that inventory developments are of major importance in the propagation of business cycles; and they matter theoretically, in the sense that recognition of their existence changes...

This paper presents a structural model of production and inventory accumulation based on the hypothesis of cost minimization. It differs from previous attempts in several respects. First, it integrates the analysis of input inventories with output inventories, treating the two stocks separately....

The basic assumption of this paper is an attempt to be specific about price formation while retaining a fixed-price, quantity-constrained equilibration in the short-run. The second theme of this paper is the role of inventories in macrodynamics a topic of long-recognized importance, but one...